Amazon and Blue Origin chief Jeff Bezos fulfills his quest to recover the engines that powered the historic Apollo 11 mission from the bottom of the sea.

About a year ago, not long after James Cameron's deep-sea dive, Amazon.com founder and space entrepreneur Jeff Bezos announced his own plan to explore the depths. Bezos wanted to recover the F-1 engines that powered the Saturn V rocket that blasted the Apollo 11 moon landing mission into orbit. Today, he announced on his website that his team has successfully retrieved the engines.

The engines, which were ejected from the Saturn V rocket as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin shot into orbit, were found 14,000 feet below the ocean's surface off the coast of Florida.

Most Popular

"We found so much." Bezos wrote on his website. "We've seen an underwater wonderland— an incredible sculpture garden of twisted F-1 engines that tells the story of a fiery and violent end, one that serves testament to the Apollo program."

Unfortunately, Bezos says, the original serial numbers are partially missing, meaning that we may never know for sure that these are from Apollo 11. Nevertheless, there are enough recovered components—found using radar and remotely operated deep-sea vehicles—to piece together two complete F-1 engines.

The engines are still the property of NASA, and Bezos hopes to see them displayed in a Seattle museum once he turns them over. While he's having the components restored to prevent further corrosion before they're put together, he intends for the completed engines to maintain the naturally weathered appearance of hardware that sat on the bottom of the ocean for several decades after plummeting from the sky at 5000 mph.